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Leslie Stevens-Huffman is a business and careers writer based in Southern California. She has more than 20 years’ experience in the staffing industry and has been writing blog posts, sample resumes and providing sage career advice to the IT professionals in our Dice Community since 2006. Leslie has a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism from the University of Southern California.

Crowd funding would allow investors to provide seed money to everyday entrepreneurs over the Internet and receive shares or dividends, which is currently prohibited by federal regulations. Forbes calls crowd funding a potentially disruptive technology and points to an NPR story that reveals how game-maker Double Fine circumvented publishers and raised $2 million in a matter of days to develop a new product.

Group funding has been used by charities for years—think PBS telethons— and most recently, the crowd-financing website Kickstarter.com provided funds for 33 films at the South By Southwest Film Festival.

While the U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill recently, it met with some resistance in the Senate, so stayed tuned.